React: A Social Data Analysis of the Night Trump Became President-Elect
Politics

Donald Trump will be President. Social media is reeling. We’ve tried to make sense of it all.

In the early hours of Wednesday 9th November, Donald Trump declared victory. It was the end of a seemingly never-ending election cycle that started over a year ago with a multitude of candidates running for each party’s nomination, an abundance of fiery debates, and a final dirty battle between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

30k tweets in a minute as Trump declares victory

Breaking it down minute-by-minute from 6pm ET last night, the declaration of victory caused a spike of around 30k tweets mentioning Trump at 2:43am.

One might have expected a bigger reaction given that Trump has previously garnered similar numbers of tweets during debates. (But those debates weren’t happening at 3am).

On Election Day, like most of the election cycle, Trump received more mentions than Clinton.

She only overtook once (around 8pm when a number of states announced their results). Between the start of November 8th and November 9th at 1:30am EST Trump accumulated in excess of 4.9 million mentions while Clinton’s count stood at over 2.7 million.

To give a sense of the global scale of the conversation, here are geo-tagged tweets mentioning the candidates in the ten minutes following that 30k peak in Trump mentions.

A look at the tweeters

Given that the world was watching, we broke down the tweets by who was talking about the candidates.

Gender-wise, there were more male individuals than female individuals tweeting about the two candidates, but females out-tweeted males when discussing Hillary Clinton.

There were 8% more tweets about Trump coming from male authors than female authors.

According to the BBC, “male voters were much more likely to back Mr Trump, while women backed Mrs Clinton by a double-digit margin.”

The top tweets

Clinton’s messages did very well on Twitter, and gaining far more retweets than her opponent who was fairly quiet on the social network during Election day.